PORVORIM: Admitting that the State government has no data on Goans employed at various private companies, the Chief Minister Pramod Sawant on Monday assured the House to come up with a legislation to make it mandatory for private sectors to declare their employment data on a regular basis. The legislation would be introduced in the next session of the State Legislative Assembly.
On Monday, the House witnessed a heated debate over the high rate of unemployment and government’s failure to maintain data on employment. The opposition, led by GFP MLA Vijai Sardesai cornered the government over its lacklusture attitude to ensure private sectors, especially industries, submits data with regards to employment to the government.
Sawant also assured the house that the government would work out a mechanism to integrate the Industries Department, Labour & Employment Department and Skill Development for data collection and to analyse the skill gaps and to upgrade it.
“By next assembly session government will be coming up with a law to make it mandatory for all Industries to share their data related to number of people employed with them and also their job vacancies,” the Chief Minister said after MLA Sardesai pointed out that of the 17,067 registered companies in Goa who are private employers hardly 14 per cent that is 2,397 have shared the data with the government.
“As per the data, 1.01 lakh people are employed in these 2,397 private companies and 50,861 of these are Goans and 50,089 are non-Goans,” Sardesai said.
Responding to the Fatorda MLA, Sawant said, “We are not allergic to Goans. The government is very much concerned about employment to Goans. But our Goan youths don’t prefer to work in labour-intensive jobs. You don’t find any Goan to work on fish trawlers. So, what kind of jobs Goans want is also something that we need to find out.” Further, Sawant claimed that the 1.2 lakh unemployment figure of the Government Employment Exchange data is misleading as nearly 1.1 lakh from these are either employed in the private sector or studying.
Even Labour and Employment Minister Atanasio Monserrate said that when the department calls up those registered with the employment exchange to check whether they have got jobs, people don’t respond positively fearing they might not get government jobs.
